


i don't know what i can save you from

by macaroonie



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Other, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Slash, Recovery, af, if u squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-19 02:53:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8186632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macaroonie/pseuds/macaroonie
Summary: It's so strange to discover someone familiar that you'd thought you'd lost forever.After ten years, hell, after almost a century, you catch the shape of their shoulders and it hurts. You've trained yourself to stop looking but this one is right and somehow fits the gap left, the absence.It's like searching through childhood toys, soaked with love and age, and rolling them through your fingers until it clicks, until the years roll away and you are exactly the age of your memories. Half the height, half the experience but the same core, familiarity, certainty of youth.
This is how it feels like to see Bucky again, and he sits down in the chair with a rush, legs going weak, drinking in the face and the uncertain expression but he knows this.
“Bucky? It's it's really you this time?”
 
obligatory post tws fic. been stewing for a long ass time and probably not worth the wait lol. not compliant w civil war but there wasn't enough tender healing in that movie for my liking anyway whoops





	

He wakes up all at once, like a cat.   
He stretches his limbs, noting the non-lethal bruises and cuts, and looks around the warehouse, scenting the stale air, watching the door.

He marvels that he can do it for himself, the stretching. 

There is blood around him, and a body which he dismisses immediately as unimportant - although he notes he should move soon unless he wants to dispose of the corpse. 

There is pain, but he has had far worse and anyway, the itch means it's healing.   
From the body, he takes a knife and the thick coat. Immediate concerns are food and water. He has never eaten on a mission before but he has no missions any more.

The feeling of satisfaction rises.

Thinking of food - an idea of hamburgers appears.  
He tries a smirk of victory from his undercover mission expressions and it pulls strangely on his face. 

Walking out of the warehouse; easy, calm, smooth, with an unevenness from the metal arm pulling at his weight. He has not done an undercover mission for a while, and it is pleasant to see he still remembers how to be unnoticed.   
His future looms ahead but the next hours are all that he can let himself think of. Possible decisions hang like underwater mines and he ducks his head unconsciously. 

Outside it is snowing. It tastes like city, from the metal on his tongue, and he sees American English on an advertisement poster. He brings the necessary language and culture to his mind, and changes his posture accordingly. Soon he is walking through a street with the wind through his ears. The gazes of the few that brave the weather slip off the man walking like smoke on the other side of the street.

There are dollars in a pocket of the coat. He goes into a shop and pays for something hot to eat and something sweet to drink with preferences he has never previously had the chance to indulge. The hamburger is as good as he thought it would be, although he does not remember ever eating one before. He savours the fries one by one, watching the civilians out of the corner of his eye and classifying them as Not Threat and Not Target with effort.

Someone watching him may notice that he tears at his food, chewing little, like an animal, and that he waits until he is safe to start. Luckily for them, they are not watching, at least not close enough.

Later, in another warehouse across the city, he lets himself think. The knowledge comes to him like very little else has – something learnt by experience, not taught – that there will be no more orders unless he permits there to be. The fight from last night slots into a mind echoing with empty spaces. A memory. And a new command to follow. Stay hidden. Do not draw attention to yourself.

So far, it’s familiar enough. The man, the soldier, with instinct, with the minimum of rational thought, slips into the darker spaces on the street, retreats from himself, moves quieter, until he is very little at all, until you would have to look very hard to find him. Stay alive. Stay hidden. Wait until you are safe.   
\-----------------------

He wakes up shivering. He wakes up fast because something sounds like a gunshot, and he is on his feet and ready to fight before he breathes out again. He looks down. His coat is covered with half melted snow and – Jesus – blood, and he looks around and he is inside a warehouse and the sun is shining weak through the window. He takes a step forward and winces and opens his coat and there is blood inside but this time it is his, and he is fully awake now, and scared, and what the fuck.

With some effort, he remembers his name. He is a soldier. He says it – James Buchanan Barnes – and it is a physical presence in the cold air. There are so many holes in his mind and he is terrified, so he says his name again, because he knows it and it is solid and it is his voice.

He doesn’t know how much longer later, but he limps out of the warehouse into the cold morning air.   
It's America, thank Jesus. It’s good to know and he doesn’t understand why. 

On him: a bloody knife for some fucking reason, and, and, dollar bills, and a greasy food wrapper in one pocket. There are lots of things he is not allowing himself to notice, in order to function, to make it down the street without collapsing in panic.  
Food. His mouth waters with the aroma from a fast food stand and he is suddenly hit with his hunger. He focuses on this, instead of the crusted blood lining his fucking leather bodysuit, and walks towards noise.

Even hobbling his back is straighter than one would think, like someone used to being looked at. 

\----------------------------------------------------

The soldier is in a basement. He neutralised the HYDRA agent who was previously inhabiting it two days ago. The warehouses he has been staying in have become too cold for continued use. It is good that he still remembers the safe house locations when he remembers so little else.   
The agent’s eyes widened gratifyingly in fear when they saw him come through the door. 

Now the body is in a dumpster on the other side of town, and the soldier is sitting on a damp bed under a flickering light.

He is squinting at a piece of paper on his lap although his eyesight is excellent, and holding a pen in his flesh hand.

In order to function without direction from handlers, he must create his own direction. Therefore, new rules.  
The paper reads, Do not be noticed.  
The man feels irritation because the clean clear words he looks to for guidance are not flowing from his pen. It would be better to say these aloud but somehow it feels, embarrassing?   
Naming an emotion is a guess, most of the time.

He knows how to write. He remembers writing for the first time with a man looming over his shoulder, being punished for the messiness, starting again, again. Copying poetry in Cryllic until he writes in copperplate. Books of it. In his left hand, to improve motor control.

He gathers himself up and writes again and does not stop.  
"Do not cause harm unless necessary.  
"Question established directives.  
"Stay alive."

The light bulb fizzes overhead and outside, the world is thick and muffled white.

\-------------------------------

James wakes again, in a different place from where he last fell asleep. The underlying alarm, dread, grows as he wakes and settles heavily in his chest. This time it is at the back of a shop, by smell and general noise, and he is nestled into a pile of dusty canvas coffee sacks.

He allows himself one hollow animal noise muffled into the jacket; of fear, of loss.

James wipes his eyes with his left hand and stops. It's cold, and hard.  
Frantically, helplessly, he rolls up his sleeve and watches part of himself glint in the dim light.

He is numb with astonishment.

The jacket is shrugged off completely and he prods the scarred junction between himself and the – machine? Contraption? New limb? The damage is obviously healed and old but still painful, too heavy for him. God, it hurts, now he thinks about it.

It moves without a hitch as he twiddles his fingers. He's half wondrous and half terrified at himself. How could he not have noticed before now? This dead weight. At least it explains the lopsidedness, but – but -

James has a flesh memory of two real arms, at some point of his broken life, so the question rises up, how and who and what and why, why, why. It's nasty. Lethal. A weapon. Other people have prosthetics, yeah, but not a single one of them were this obviously nasty. He makes a fist and grimaces at the strength of it.

Footsteps patter and he breaks out of his thoughts with effort and relief in facing a physical enemy.  
A heartfelt “Fuck,” comes out without wanting to. His head snaps up towards the door and he tries to put away his disorientation. 

He's a soldier. He knows how to fight if he needs to. He is braced and ready when the light pours in through the dust.

It's a girl, who assesses him slowly with her eyebrows raising in surprise. She's wearing a uniform and carrying some sort of check list but it ends up hanging from the cords on her belt as settles her hands on her hips. 

James tries to emanate harmlessness, if she doesn't come closer, although he's not sure what he could do if she came closer, what threat is he in a position to offer?

A second more eye contact, and James is trembling with tension.   
She smiles at him suddenly, making up her mind, and shakes her head in disbelief.   
“You have fun there. Just make sure to be out before the boss comes back.” The door closes swiftly and he hears her huff out a laugh from outside.   
James is left shaking, but it takes him a while to realise he's laughing too, big desperate breaths. 

He doesn’t expect anything, and he doesn’t know anything, anything at all. 

\----------------------------------------

The soldier comes to in a grocery store, in front of the fruit aisle.

He looks calmly around, reaching for a bag of tangerines.  
(He knows the smell but not the taste. It’s a whole world to learn. He could not tell you why he chose tangerines).

There is a woman at the counter reading a magazine and no-one else – no security cameras – so no evidence, hopefully. He relaxes minutely and keeps an eye on the door.

He is notes but is not alarmed that he is somewhere new and that he does not remember the intervening period between last conscious memory and now. The feeling is familiar to almost every memory he has, and perhaps he let himself assume this is how normal people, civilians, recall their time.  
But this has to be a lie. He pushes himself, consistent to his self-assigned mission to question further than what he is given, and halts with the fruit in one gloved hand.

These losses have been happening around once or twice a day, starting approximately a fortnight ago. Sometimes it's been the whole daylight hours, sometimes minutes gone. He does not panic because at least this time it does not hurt when it shifts. He’s spent so long rising and being forced into sleep with years intervening, but he’s never had to live a life before.   
From what he knows about civilians (and he knows so much more now, about small and complex lives lacking casual cruelty and constant threat), this is not a normal occurrence.  
Sometimes he is suddenly hungry and it is twilight, or like now, standing in a place with awful sightlines attracting attention.   
He thinks he has hurt no-one yet while he is - gone, but of course he cannot be sure. As far as possible, he's trying to avoid that. Deaths create attention. He shies away from his memories of his previous handlers easily but this is a truth he does not need to learn again.

Maybe this should be worse, a Concern.  
But nothing is in his control any more – not that it ever was – and he is drifting, letting events and experiences accumulate in his mind like driftwood on an empty shore. There is nothing he can do. If it is a malfunction of his hardware, if his mind is disintegrating due to cryofreeze after cryofreeze, then he will die.

He pays for the bag and tries a smile at the server without waiting for the response.

In the park, where he can see the movements of the city easily, he peels the first fruit, testing his motor control and finding the delicate task more taxing than he expected.

\-----------------------------

James wakes to find a tangerine in his hand and eats it greedily, licking juice off his fingers. He starts a second with a momentary pause for what? who? he has no-one to share it with - but it feels like something he should do.  
Sitting on a bench, he eats until he is full and his lips are tingling, because, shit, how long has it been since he's eaten one of these, eh?

He catches himself thinking it and tries to track it. James is pretty sure that he used to have an actual life because every once in a while he is longing for something, laughing at something, and he doesn't know why. Sure, he could just be crazy (probably true anyway) but it feels natural.  
He knows he's American, grew up in a big city, is missing someone important like an ache in his chest to add to the ache of his arm.

He even knows this fucking tangerine - the taste of pith on grubby fingers, the shine of it.  
It's actually an okay moment in what is now his senseless and horrifying life. The sun is setting through the leafless trees and he feels settled somehow.  
He thinks - and he doesn't realise he's speaking aloud until the one other nasty hobo in the park looks at him sideways – I think I can do this. I'm alive, which is marginally better than the alternative, and maybe I'll remember one day and then I'll be better and this will all be gone.

\--------------------

James looks in the shiny side of a shop window and grimaces. He pushes back his mop of hair and he thinks he used to grease it back but it's dirty enough now that he doesn't need to. James is pretty sure he used to care about that sort of thing.

He is getting used to taking advantage of his moments of being himself. There's $20 in his pocket and a barber shop across the road.

In the barber's chair he smiles up bright and easy (he's been practising whenever he can) and says “Short on the sides, yeah? But sort of floppy on top,” because it feels right.

He buys nail clippers, a razor, with the mysterious dollars he finds in his pockets (money is not supposed to work like this, he is definitely sure). Spends a frustrating hour trying to shave without a mirror but when he comes back, his nails are short and neat and he is clean shaven with a fast healing cut on the tricky spot underneath his chin, which makes him smile.

\------------------------------------

The soldier does not risk going to the museum again, although he wants to. It's one of the few wants he does not indulge, and strong enough that he writes it into his crumpled list.

Do not search for your past.

He is aware that the target, the Former Mission, is responsible for his freedom. But it's a risk he cannot take, to seek him out and ask him who he saw when they were together and the Captain's face shifted, moved, broke, his voice calling a name that is not his.

Defying this rule would be plain stupid. He is safe here. Rogers is high profile, and the previous connection increases the risk, as anyone looking for him would be tracking the Captain too.  
He underlines the item in the list anyway, just in case, which doesn't stop him day-dreaming about infiltrating Rogers' base and, and, what?  
It is strange to learn you do not have control over all of your thoughts and that two parts of you can want different things.

\----------------------------

Working theory – James is sharing this body with someone else.  
It sounds fucking weird. But it works, sorta. If he was just, sleepwalking or something, when he isn't there, then how come he buys things, peels citrus fruit, and does weird shit that a human does?  
He found a piece of paper in his pocket which has a distressing and well thumbed list of rules, which he did not write. But who else could have written it?

Other him picks up knick-knacks, like buttons and shit, (which he keeps) and never throws away his litter (which is gross and which he does not keep).

Other him does not like human contact, although James is sick for it. The one time he booked himself into a homeless shelter, figuring, hey, he's technically homeless, if inexplicably full of money he woke up two days later in another district. But they both like tangerines. And they both like New York, which feels righter than anywhere else to be.

He's running his hands through his new hair, feeling the short bits on the back. The barber almost shaved it there but it grows back really fast, like his nails.

Around him is the city passing. This is very familiar. He can tell he used to be social but now his life is spent with himself. Maybe even before then he spent a lot of time watching people.

He's in Brooklyn which feels righter than other areas but still not right enough. At first everything was too weird to sort out the things that felt the worst, but he's sure this is one of the confusing but still familiar rather than bad weird.   
Sometimes he catches images laid over his vision and he stops and tries to find them.   
The people are too rich, he thinks.  
The sign reads, Brooklyn Bridge Park, construction begun in 2008. Feels wrong. Looks pretty.

So: he's people watching, like he does everyday he can, and he sees a short blond guy and he feels sick, jolted, like a punch to the stomach.

He's running helplessly after him before he can stop himself, and the world is jerky and he still feels nausea mixed with relief, he can't name it but the world is swelling and he can almost hear it in his ears -  
They turn round at his tap on the shoulder and it's wrong. The world sinks steady and grey.

For one thing out of so many, it's a girl.

The face is sharp and smart (good) but everything else is not, not, not as it fucking should be.

In the endless moment where his vision melts and he stares right through her (what was he expecting? Who did he want? Why can't he remember?) she says clearly, “I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I'm deaf.”  
This makes it better somehow, until he sees her worried brown eyes which are an insult.  
With detached wonder, he watches his hands carve out of the air, I'm sorry. I thought you were a friend of mine.  
A pause while she assesses him. I've, he starts again, I've been missing them for a long time.  
She wishes him luck. He is left with his hands in his hair, mind rolling.

He spoke the truth but he didn’t know it until the words ran out without him asking. 

\---------------------------

The only time he knows everything is when he is dreaming.  
Running through the broken landscape of his mind, a monster, a man. He knows, he knows.  
He shares the memories with himself because they are too much for one person and there’s a logic to them, but it’s so cruel. He cries for his loss and never wakes up.  
The morning brings with it ignorance, like sunlight shafting through dirty windows, and the man and the soldier are a little closer and a little better for not knowing.

\------------------------------------

At this point, what James knows about himself can be summed up very quickly:  
-he used to live in New York.  
-His favourite sandwiches are beef and pickle.  
-He has a painful and powerful metal arm.  
-He used to have a friend, and the loss, now he knows it to be loss, bruises him as he breathes.

God, he's lonely. There are people in Antarctica who are better connected than him. He has his name, his body (minus the arm which seems to come from somewhere else).   
He writes on the miserable list, Find your friend, and when he next sees it it's crossed out angrily.  
But when he writes it harder, it stays.

\---------------------------------------------------------------

This is something neither of them know, and how should they? They live their lives alone, paradoxically. They are isolated by choice and by circumstance. Man is an island, and their spring of willing and anima is running dry with no-one else to pour to. But they have each other. The borders are melting between James and the soldier as living wears them down.

The soldier buys hamburgers because he already knows what they taste like, but one day he walks by a small shop and the scent makes him stop. 

The store owner sees him pause and unfolds from the door. She winks at him (not target, communicating friendliness not recognition) and beckons the soldier into her store, says “I know everyone says this but our sandwiches really are the best in Brooklyn. Here, try some honey, on me. You sure you’ve never had this before?”

He buys one. He buys two. He practises the smile and it might even be genuine. He is caught in pure pleasure, memory, familiarity.

After that, he buys corned beef where he can find it.   
For himself, but when he sees them, for people in the streets too. He tells himself it's because it is always a good idea to leave happy witnesses, and large sums of money would be too obvious in this particular scenario.  
The warm coats he buys for an entire alley on one particularly cold night are less explainable, but one useful skill he doggedly maintains is to not ask questions about why he does some of the things he does. Directives, he knows the reason for. So he ignores it. It's easier, in the long run.

James, on the other hand, stops going into busy stores and stops talking. Things seem more dangerous with every day.  
Sometimes he tries punching imaginary enemies in an empty house, smart talking them, cutting them down easily like they were moths instead of people although, of course, each and everyone of them is from his head (which doesn't necessarily make them less real).

He does endless press-ups (with wry amusement, James notes that his left arm can go for hours without stopping) and sit-ups and any of the other exercises he remembers from when he was young and foolish and cared about what he looked like.  
Hell, maybe he still does a little. He feels young and foolish, especially when he startles at sudden noises or horribly familiar faces. And he tries to keep clean and to shave and to generally prevent himself from looking like someone who crawled out of a bin, although he's not sure who for.

\---------------------------------------  
James is in another unchanging store buying food late at night that doesn't need to be kept cold when someone walks in with the outline of a gun underneath their ratty hoodie.

Maybe someone else wouldn't have noticed it.  
The man is young and tall and skinny, and nervous enough that he can almost smell it from across the room, but that doesn't mean anything.

The gun. The gun. You can kill with a gun, even if you don't mean to. The kid looks around and licks his lips, and checks his watch.

It's nothing, he tells himself. This is New York. This kid probably thinks he's hard, with a gun. It doesn't mean anything.  
The kid moves out of sight and he follows, not even knowing he is following. Maybe someone else would be scared, but James feels excitement rising, completely improbable.

There is this stupid boy with danger in his pocket and there is the rest of the world.

The kid walks up to the counter and the worker looks up, smile ready.

The kid puts a bag of candy down and pulls out the gun in the same jerky movement.

The counter-girl looks up into the barrel, smile frozen.

“Don't call the cops. Give me what's behind the till and you don't get hurt.”

The kid, or rather the young man, speaks soft and deep. He has not noticed James, which is not surprising – no-one notices James – but that gives him an edge.

Assuming this becomes a fight, which it shouldn't.

In another life he might have been a soldier, yeah, but this man has a gun. What they say about facing men with guns: don't. Get out, call the police. Someone else can deal with it but you should stay alive and shouldn’t meddle with things you don’t have to. 

His eyes are drawn again to the trigger. It is silent and eloquent menace.

Or he could sneak out of the store and leave. The woman won't get hurt, he said, if she does what he says. But who's to trust his word?

Or, or, in this fantasy world where he can take on a gunman unarmed and not get shot in the chest for the trouble, he could get this man down and call the police on the woman's phone and get out. This is as backwater as Brooklyn gets, so there’s no-one to see him do it.

And then, logically, the streets again? Like it never even happened?

The possibility of involving another player in this intense and intimate game does not even occur to him. It is the woman, frozen, the young man upright and arrogant with the gun in his gloved hand, and James, watching him count the money and pat her on the head until he can't take it.

Fuck, this is bad, this is really bad.

He steps out. He is quiet, of course. He knows how to do that even if he is unsure about everything else.

The woman notices him and looks away instantly, trying to keep his secret, but she hides her surprise too late and the kid must read the hope in her eyes.

The young man turns around and moves his weapon into the face of a soldier.

“Get down or I'll shoot!” voice cracking on the movie-stolen line.  
He is nervous now. This is not going to plan. He almost fumbles the gun as he changes the position and sweat gathers on the metal.

James stays still and unthinking until he hears the click of the safety, meant to scare him into submission, and then he cannot remember from then.

\----------------------------------------------

Later, the till-woman tells the rest of the story to her wife. She hasn’t told the police or any of her friends this version, the truest one. They are lying together in the dark after an achingly long day and the secret leaks out, into the shared darkness. 

“So – Lucy - what I didn't tell you was that there was another guy in the shop, on that night. You know that night?   
This man – I couldn't believe I didn't notice him before. The guy with the gun was facing me and I was facing the door and this guy stepped out of one of the aisles.  
I could smell the metal, it was so close to my face. I was thinking of you, of how stupid it would be to die on the night shift I'm covering for someone else, when I'm so close to graduating, fucking finally. So I was staying completely still. Like a rabbit.”

Her wife stirs. She is almost asleep but she can tell the story is something that needs to be listened to.   
“There was another man?” she offers. “But you told the police that -”

“I know. But there was a man – and he was grimy, sorta like a hobo – and he was coming up behind the guy with the gun. Slowly, so quiet I didn't notice him until he was close enough to knock him out. I didn't know what he would do but I hoped that he'd pull some superhero act and get me out of this shit. Maybe it showed in my eyes, because the kid who was holding me up turned round and the new guy walked straight into it. Pointed right into his forehead, but the new guy didn't seem fazed, even when he threatened him like he threatened me.  
I was so glad that it was off me, I felt like laughing.  
And then the kid did something with his gun, I don't know, and the man – the new one – switched.”

“Switched?”

“I don't know. His eyes got hard. He didn’t look scared any more, like any sane human would be, faced with a pistol. This blankness took over. It was terrifying, and for me and the kid both. I could see my guy try to back away, but he couldn't escape that stare.”

She pauses for a second to try to get the story straight in her head. Her wife is sitting up now, unavoidably interested.

Finally, “I've never seen anything like it. It took him maybe seconds from switching to get that man down on the floor and out cold. Before I would have said he stood no chance but after seeing that?  
And then he turned to me. Fuck! I was so scared! More scared of this stubbly hobo than of that gun ten times over! The way he moved – maybe he was some sort of assassin, from a movie, was the closest thing I could think of at the time.”

“And?” her partner prompts. She is fully awake now, intent and serious.

“And, he came over to me, almost hyperventilating and wishing I could hide under that counter, and tells me 'I'm not going to hurt you.', but seriously enough that I almost believe him.

He had a nice Brooklyn accent, I remember, which I didn't expect.

Then he looks around, a little confused, like what he just did surprised him too, and then says 'You cannot tell anyone about me being here. I'll help you cover up the body and then I have to leave.'  
I come back at him like, you killed him? That guy on the floor right there? And he says he'll be out for a couple of hours but no, he is not dead. He looks a little proud.

He's wearing gloves, I remember, which is why the police didn't find fingerprints. Maybe they didn't even dust for them. I gave a pretty convincing statement, I think. Not like anyone would believe me!

This guy is helping me but do not think I am calm at this, not at all. He took down a gunman – unarmed! - in less time than it takes me to walk to the fridge.  
He starts showing me a choke to do on the body, and I am still so freaked out that it takes me a while to realise what he's doing. I settle into the choke pretty easy because it’s not too far from what we do in my class and he calls the police on my phone and holds it to my mouth.”

Her wife finishes, “And you tell the police this jerk walks into the shop and pulls out a gun, and when he turns around for a second you take him down, with your seven years training of martial arts. No new guy involved at all.”

They look each other, and by sharing it she’s made herself not scared anymore.  
They are both delighted - that it’s happened to them of all people, that she’s safe, that on these streets there is walking danger and it is on their side.

“By the time I look down again he is gone. It's like a weird dream or something, and it's easier to just pretend that he never was there, that I was alone in that shitty little shop. But you know me. I had to tell someone.”

They move closer together. Her wife whispers, “Do you think you'll ever see him again? This mystery vigilante?” and she responds with “He's a guy who won't be found if he doesn't want to be, trust me. But I'd like to say thank you, at least.”

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The soldier steals a smart-phone from a businessman as soon as he figures out how it could work.

The internet is rich in references to “Steve Rogers”, and even knowledgeable when he tentatively tries “James Buchanan Barnes”. He reads and he knows a little more but still nothing close to enough.

Here is the problem. He cannot be appropriately orientated without sufficient intel. Previous operations were on a need-to-know basis but more data is required to exist without back up.  
( Also: Rogers makes him twitch and it is a distraction. But that is secondary to intel, of course.)

The solution. A possible solution. Find him. Make him talk. Then leave him, forget him, live your life as you have been living it, as yours. Whatever you do, don't fucking let him tether you. You are done being treated like a dog.

So, he finds out where the Captain has been staying. He stays on roofs and in alleys, and watches this man move about his life, oblivious of the figure always above him. He would think the Captain stupid for not noticing the surveillance, but smugly the soldier knows he is the best, and when he means to they do not know.  
It takes a week until he does something but it doesn't even feel like waiting. It feels better and more important than his entire life up until now.  
The shoulders and the blond hair, the small niceties with others, the space of sadness around him. It is something which feels familiar and awful altogether. He knows this man. He remembers him, beyond the bridge. It is subtle but watching him grows something in his chest.

For the first time he glimpses a life outside of stealing rooms to sleep, silence. The soldier examines himself and finds it wanting. He does not hurt anyone (except for the agents following the Captain, but that was necessary action, and they were so clumsy in comparison that it was almost a mercy) but this can’t be counted as net good. What is he here for? 

Like this, sometimes he even wishes for the bad old days when at least he had purpose even if everyone and their dog knew it was false and flawed. But he was blinkered, and blinkered horses do not startle or question their drivers. Maybe that was easier.

\---------------------------------------------

James lives now in this one area in Brooklyn. His other half seems to like it there. He comes to in a selection of seemingly random places, and it takes him a while but he realises they have a pattern. Following someone, maybe? He writes ? on the back of the rule sheet and is answered with wait. One time, left with a sense of waiting and vague purpose, he stuck around for an hour or two on the howling roof of a brownstone and watched the sun rise on the thousand thousand people of his city. Maybe that's all that is happening. Him and Other Him appreciating a good view. He thinks of the mystery friend who will glue him back together and feels the futility of his task sitting empty in his chest. There’s no guarantee that he’ll even want him back, when, if, they find him. 

It's when he's reading a newspaper that he finally gets it. He bought it new from a stall, which was good weird, and although he understands about half the sentences that he reads, the paper and the print are a comfort and a calendar.

Some random article: he reads the name, “Steve,” and he knows that it is the name, the one.

His heartbeat picks up and he clenches the paper to shreds. 

There must be a thousand thousand Steve's in this city.   
But it doesn’t matter. A name. He has a name. 

\------------------------

He steps out, finally. This time seems like the culmination of everything he's done since coming alive.  
What can he say to him? He means something, meant something to this man. Who knows what it is now.

He tried to kill him. The soldier knows that if someone tried to kill him, and failed, and resurfaced, there would be no third time, and the captain is competent, skilled and wary.

And biased. Incredibly enough, proven to be biased. Towards the soldier and against all reason, and not in the way that people are usually biased about the soldier in the way they are biased about heavily armed men in black leather, but like something is drawing him in his gut, completely unavoidable. Like he leans towards him and like it is inevitable.   
His expression on the helicarrier was of hopelessness.  
The soldier has seen the Captain searching for something and it is only recently that he allows himself to believe that it could be him, and even then only because he feels the same irrational pull in his chest.

He steps out of the shadows and it is to the Captain's credit that he does not flinch.  
Now those steady eyes are on him, his mind is completely blank and his mouth is stoppered.  
It's been so long since he's spoken, maybeall that will come out is a rasp when he tries.

The Captain is face to face with the faceless man. The soldier reads the body (he is very good at reading faces but this is easier than that, like breathing) and it twitches minutely before settling, calm, serene.  
He licks his lips and says, “Bucky,”

\----------------------------------

which is his name, of course, not that he's ever really forgotten.  
His voice sounds terrible. He thought he'd got over that cough last winter, but maybe it's come back again.  
God, he's tall now.  
He shakes his head slightly as the knowledge floods back, that Steve grew out of his clothes with that fancy serum, but that he never really grew out of Bucky.

Bucky watches him from behind the glass wall of his face, from behind his hair. This cannot be happening, so it isn't.  
He takes the opportunity to study Stevie's new and nightmare face with his familiar broken nose and his fluffy haircut. It's a dream, it must be. It's a nightmare where everything is real when he's in it and he remembers his mauled and crumbling past.

He’s dreamt this before, he knows it now. Usually at this point he runs up and hugs him. Once he even took the daring step of picking up his skinny and known body and swung him and they both laughed like fucking kids but his was the wrong laugh, and then it all broke apart. 

Usually he's small, though. This isn't quite right.

Perhaps something's gone wrong when he's more wary of a break from his nightmare's progression than the nightmare itself. Then again, it's likely something went wrong long before this point, to leave him here, silent and horrified in an alley he doesn't remember. What year is it, again?

Steve speaks without clearing his throat.   
“I know you've been following me for a couple of weeks. I've seen you. But my friends have said not to initiate contact. That I should let you come to me. And now you've come.”

Bucky – James – is entranced by the sound of Steve's voice. He's never spoken before, not in this version of themselves. Incredible as it seems, maybe he is the same. The truth, this time.  
Steve was never one for speeches but this has been carefully rehearsed, which makes him feel incredibly touched. 

A lifetime away, Bucky remembers him trying out his best disappointed face in front of their half-broken mirror at home. Another rehearsal. 

However, he seems to be waiting for some sort of response, which seems unlikely on all fronts. His throat has sealed, even if he had an idea of what he could say.  
He nods instead to indicate comprehension. A mute animal. He is so sorry he cannot offer anything better.

“And I know it was you who saved my life on the Potomac. I know it was because you remember me, even if only a little. Bucky, you idiot, you punk. I've been looking for you. I've been here ready and waiting and you've left me looking stupid.”

He's trying to joke but it looks more like tears and Bucky instinctively flinches back from the emotion and just as quickly calms himself. This is Steve. This is safe. But he cannot say a single word.

Against Bucky's impenetrable silence, Steve lurches to a stop. Although he has been deathly still this entire encounter, the nervous energy propelling him flounders against the brick wall of Bucky. The hunch of his shoulders is familiar and resigned exhaustion.

“You know me, at least?”

His voice and face is crumbling swiftly and irreparably, and he has to say something otherwise he will leave and he will be alone.

He manages, “Yes. Of course I remember you.”

\---------------------------------

They don't touch or rush together, make sure the other is real. It is a subdued meeting. The Captain's eyes are shining in triumph but he keeps his large, fine-boned hands to himself.

He is not the Bucky that Steve remembers, obviously. Some smaller and less incandescent version of him inhabits this body.  
But he goes along with him when he calls, utterly helpless not to. Perhaps it would be more merciful to tell him now than to let him hope. However, he is too selfish. Bucky is too selfish.

Feeling like he is dragging him down is familiar, too.

Steve is gentle and thankfully silent when they walk up the stairs together to his apartment.  
Maybe he says something once they get in – about a bed? His bed? - but the day has been too long. His vision is slipping. He nods and leaves the clean, hopeful kitchen, searching for somewhere to put away today, and before he knows, he's out.  
The Captain – Steve – leaves him alone and his dreams are clear. Tomorrow will be more complicated but the place smells the same as it used to all those years ago, of Steve.

\-----------------------------------

It's four in the morning. It's too quiet in the expensive apartment (by now he's used to the early morning city buzz) and it takes him a whole horrified minute of panic before he realises where he is.

In Steve's apartment. Right. Because Steve found him or he found Steve or some combination of the two, and now he's sleeping in a bed that belongs to him. He is not alone.  
For a while, he sits up and wonders what the heck he's doing there. The shadows from passing cars move over the walls, rushed and unceasing. His head feels murky and his thoughts are very slow.  
I'm thirsty, he thinks, but it takes a while for the thought to turn into action. Bucky does not feel safe but rather sedated, like it's all someone else's problem. God, he's tired.

The kitchen is full of Steve. He looks up when he comes in and he seems exhausted. Bucky finds himself wanting to ask why (is it him?), but he doesn't know the boundaries yet. What is allowed? What about the soldier, when he surfaces? It's all too much to think about, especially when all of him is leaning towards Steve and the comfort of his presence. It would be better if he let it go. He can feel his thoughts stirring in a place he can't reach, somewhere beyond his conscious thought.

They don't touch. Didn't they used to touch all the time? Hands on shoulders, leaning in, sharing beds. He can remember so little.

He drinks his water in slow sips, never taking his eyes off Steve who in turn never maintains eye contact, switching from place to place too measured to be random.

His tiredness is the slow moving carp beneath this pool of quiet. 

He puts a hand on the counter to steady himself and, god he’s tired, he crumples.

Steve cannot help himself. He rushes over and one hand rests lightly on his arm, pulling up, checking, and someone else brings the body back up to standing and looks out through the blue eyes. 

The Captain steps back. 

Clear-eyed, the soldier assesses the room and then turns his attention to the Captain.

The Captain is wary but not scared.

The soldier says, “I can't stay here.”

“Why not?”

I'll compromise you. They'll find me here. This is already further than I meant to go.  
He shakes his head, once, angrily. He didn't want to talk to him but his face is crawling for an answer, something to explain this mess.  
Meet the Captain, get what you need, move on.  
James chooses a chair on the opposite side of the room and sits with his hands folded on his knees.  
This isn't even about the other man. This is about him.  
His head, his grapple with his parasites that lodge there how to exist, to be human instead of machine.

“I don't feel comfortable staying here. We can talk, but at my time and place.”  
The Captain looks confused, but readily nods and stands easily to let him leave.

– -------------------------------------------------

He doesn't know what he expected, from seeing him again.  
It was only a couple of hours and he knows, logically, that he isn't the same, but it was so good to see him.  
Already all the warnings had dissolved in his ears.  
Bucky Barnes! Sleeping in his bed in his house, like they always said would happen when they grew up!  
And now he understands even less than he did but he knows a little more. Some lead-heavy facts.

This new Bucky was the man on the bridge.  
Six months older and softer, but unmistakeably that same broken edge he saw before; same shape, different person.  
So who came up with him into the apartment?

Around him, outside him and his waves of thought, the city stretches and blearily opens its eyes. City night becomes indistinguishable city dawn, pale and lifted.  
He holds his head in his hands and at some point falls asleep with his neck cricked and unprotected.

\----------------------------------------------------

It's two days later. A note through Steve's door, one of the first since he arrived here. Time and place only. The handwriting is different, but-

Steve arrives at the cafe exactly at the hour.  
It's bustling and thickly scented and seems too conspicuous, but again, he's trying to go into this with a stripped mind. Clear of memory, of the layers of association that he can't help painting over even the sound of his name.  
It's very difficult.

But, he steps in and he sees him like a candle in a dark room.  
This one is his Bucky.  
He doesn't understand but by golly, he's going to find out.

It's so strange to discover someone familiar that you'd thought you'd lost forever.  
After ten years, hell, after almost a century, you catch the shape of their shoulders and it hurts. You've trained yourself to stop looking but this one is right and somehow fits the gap left, the absence.  
It's like searching through childhood toys, soaked with love and age, and rolling them through your fingers until it clicks, until the years roll away and you are exactly the age of your memories. Half the height, half the experience but the same core, familiarity, certainty of youth.

This is how it feels like to see Bucky again, and he sits down in the chair with a rush, legs going weak, drinking in the face and the uncertain expression but he knows this.

“Bucky? It's it's really you this time?”

This is awful.

Bucky, Bucky, says “Yes, Steve, Steve?”

The whole story reels out and he hardly has to do anything except listen.  
His wonder fades very quickly into anger – not at him, of course, but at the monsters that are responsible for Bucky's shattered mind.  
Underneath it is thickly spread relief that the moments they have had this century are real and are as true as anything in the 1930's. Unbidden, galloping joy at the possibility of a Bucky he can have again for keeps.

Right now he seems coherent and, well, as himself as it is possible to be.  
A little distant and forgetful, sure, but overall much like the Bucky that came after the HYDRA base, the start to all this, if he only knew it at the time.

In a pause where Bucky drinks his coffee and tries to pretend that everything is okay to the waitress, Steve says “How much do you remember?” and means How much of me do you remember?

Bucky says cautiously, “Your name, of course. What you look like. That we were friends.”

Steve clenches the table violently and forces himself to relax. 

“That’s enough. For now, that’s enough.”


End file.
